Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Out of This Furnace, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Immigration and American Identity
Industrialization and Destruction
The American Dream vs. Reality
Women’s Work
Capital vs. Labor
Summary
Analysis
After he votes in the election, Mike spends the evening drinking with Steve Bodnar in Wold’s saloon, and the two men eventually stumble out drunk. They stagger through the First Ward as Mike becomes progressively angrier over the election and his inability to make a comfortable life for his family. He vomits several times, so the men settle down on a doorstep. Steve admonishes Mike for his political rebelliousness and talk of trying to revive the union. In response, Mike launches into a hopeless lament. He criticizes the atmosphere of fear that the company has created among its workers, paralyzing them into silence by threatening their jobs. He worries that he will soon be too old and too worn out to work, and he fears he will never be able to make something more of himself.
Mike’s descent into despair over his inability to change his life for the better marks the second time in the novel where Bell displays the abject failure of the American Dream. Just as Kracha tried to realize the American Dream on his own and failed, Mike succumbs to the realization that one person cannot hope to topple the ruling power structures that make it impossible for an immigrant steelworker to realize the American Dream.
Themes
Mike expresses pride in his work and the steel he helps to create, but criticizes the steel bosses who view steelworkers as less than worthless. “More than coke and ore is going into those furnaces of theirs,” he states, pointing out how many men have given their lives to make steel for the company. Finally, Mike exclaims that chance runs the world, denies the existence of God, and resigns himself to his degraded lot in life. “Our work and our dreams,” he states, “none of it matters.” Although Mike has long felt that “no human being need go without his portion of comfort and beauty and quietness,” his experience has taught him that the powerful people in the world think otherwise. Finally, a woman leans out of her window and urges the two men to go home.
Here, Bell unleashes his most withering condemnation of the exploitive labor practices that degrade steelworkers’ humanity. The destruction of workers’ bodies, minds, and dreams are direct byproducts of American industrialization. Mike’s drunken descent into nihilism represents Bell’s indictment of an industrial system that promises progress and freedom but, in reality, sows misery and hopelessness. American industry makes men who previously wanted to live now want to die. Mike’s claim that “none of it matters” represents his spiritual death, and it is no coincidence that his spirt dies shortly before his actual body does: by deciding that he has nothing to live for, death is now Mike’s only option, even if his death does not come by his own hand.
Themes
